skeletons (3 page)

She turned over, buried her face in the pillow. “Because if he was murdered,” she muffled, “I’m responsible. I killed him.”

“Bullshit!” I roared. “If you have to know, Tyler, you go!”

“I can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

“I can’t tell you.”

I bounced to my feet. “Can’t tell me! Well I’ll tell you, kiddo! No way will I pin on a star and gallop after the bad guys! And no way will I let anybody con me into an early grave with love and children and a vine-covered condominium—my God that’s base! That’s the all-time low!”

She was crying. I whipped open a drawer and grabbed pajama bottoms and banged the drawer shut and marched into the living room and hauled on the bottoms and switched off the lights and tried to sleep on the sofa and eventually argued myself into a righteous doze. Interrupted by flashcuts of a coffin coming down a conveyor belt.

The scream of sirens woke me to my usual chills. The room was a dirty gray. Dawn comes to New York like a tourist these days. Cautiously.

I yawned into the bedroom. She had cried herself to sleep, clutching her pillow. Naked, beautiful, helpless. I knew Tyler Vaught not at all. I loved her terribly, and pitied her somehow, but there remained, at the same time, a residue of last night’s anger. Suddenly, in the light, the glint of metal in her overnight case, open on a rack. I went to it and took up the old gun. It was cold and heavy in my hand. I loathe lethal weapons. It was a Colt revolver. She took it everywhere with her, like a doll, even on our honeymoon. It was the only thing she had written me to send her after she left me to live with Max Sansom. And now, except for clothing and cosmetics, it was all she had brought with her from his apartment.

I carried the gun into the living room. Stamped into the frame above the cylinder was the serial number 40177. It was one of a matched pair, she had told me, belonging to her grandfather Buell Wood, and with it, and the other, he had killed three men. I wondered where its mate might be, the gun numbered 40176 or 40178.

I put it down and got out a Rand-McNally to see where Harding was. Fifty miles or so west and north of El Paso. In the middle of nowhere.

I picked up the Colt again, intending to return it to Tyler’s case, but passing the full-length mirror in a closet door stopped at my reflection. Dimly I confronted myself. And what was in my hand. I slumped shoulders, spread and planted bare feet, let the gun hang loose by my pajama leg. On impulse I tried a fast draw, and my quickness pleased me. Fixing my face in a smile-when-you-say-that-stranger mask, I tried another. Jimmie Butters, GUNFIGHTER.

In the last hour of her life Charlotte Wood drives a buggy behind a cob horse into Harding. Since she does not know she is to die she thinks not of death but of her errands in town. To stop by the Standard Grocery and pick up two twelve-ounce cans of Dr. Price’s Phosphate Baking Powder. To check the sale at Clardy’s, which is offering ladies’ pumps and oxfords at half price. To have a look at men’s Kuppenheimer “Air-o-Weave” suits in gray at the Tog Shop, advertised at $15 in the
Graphic,
and if they please her, to try tonight to persuade Buell to shed his legalistic black serge for the summer.

It is a pure spring afternoon. Sunlight glisters on the Tres Hermanas, or Three Sisters, three conical peaks close to one another in the west. The glass blue of sky, the prance of the cob, the drum roll of pebbles on the undercarriage of the buggy—these fill Charlotte Wood with pleasure. On the seat beside her, in a cocoon of shawl and cradled in an Indian basket, her infant daughter Helene sleeps to the lullaby of wheels.

She is happy. Her baby is beautiful. She is in love with her husband. She is twenty-nine.

In the Luna, a saloon on Harding’s main street, three young men enjoy their final minutes on this earth. Since they do not know they have only minutes they think not of dying but shoot loud pool and swill ten-cent beer and get brag drunk. They are Tigh Gooding and two brothers, Bill and George Pennington. They work on nearby ranches. They costume themselves as cowboys, deport themselves as cowboys, but rather than branding and yahooing and bunking under the stars they mend fence and doctor sick stock and repair machinery, so they are ranch hands, not cowboys. It is a “come-down.” It is a matter, almost, of emasculation. This is why, when they ride into town every two weeks, they get drunk as cowboys always did in the good old days; and why, though the carrying of weapons is prohibited by town ordinance, they conceal guns and cartridge belts in their saddlebags in case there may be, they hope, some kind of showdown with somebody over something.

Shortly before he is to kill, Buell Wood sits in his office drawing a will for a widow. Since he does not know he will kill he thinks not of the deed and its consequences but of his wife and child. Charlotte will be driving in from her father’s ranch now, he reckons, Helene in the basket beside her, and she will stop at the Tog Shop, he guesses, to have a look at the Kuppenheimer suits he has seen advertised in the
Graphic.
If they please her, she will probably begin a campaign tonight to get him into one for the summer.

Until four years ago, Buell Wood had been sheriff of Harding County, an officer with a reputation for disinterest, accuracy with firearms, and a readiness to use them. Pat Garrett, famous as the Lincoln County sheriff who laid Billy Bonney low, had said of him in public: “I would rather have Wood with me in a tight than any man I know.” On his resignation, a grateful citizenry had made Wood the gift of a matched pair of pistols.

Cob, buggy, Charlotte Wood, and Helene enter Harding from the south, trotting a half circle on Silver Street around the new Harding County Courthouse. They turn left onto Gold Street, the principal thoroughfare.

As they turn, Tigh Gooding and the Pennington brothers leave the Luna and swagger to their horses tied in front. One of them has an idea. It is to defy the ordinance, and the town, and the civilization which has reduced them from cowboys to ranch hands, then ride away hell-for-leather, leaving only the echo of their laughter. They open saddlebags, buckle on cartridge belts and holsters, pull their weapons.

After his resignation, and the appointment of Blaise Gilmore to succeed him as sheriff, Buell Wood went to El Paso, read law at a firm there, returned to Harding, hung out his shingle, and commenced at once to earn a living. Two years ago he fell in love with and married Charlotte Dampier, daughter of a prosperous rancher. An inheritance from her mother bought the couple a house in Harding and built for Buell a one-room office at the west end of Gold Street.

As she passes the Luna, Charlotte Wood reins the cob over to avoid a wagon laden with sacks of chicken meal.

Tigh Gooding and the Penningtons fire revolvers into the air.

Buell Wood tenses.

Gunshots.

Down the street.

He waits.

At the reports, the cob horse rears and bolts.

The buggy lurches, the right front wheel slams into, is broken and held immovable by, the left front fender of a Marmon sedan.

Charlotte Wood and child are hurled from the buggy, mother headlong into the concrete base of a watering trough, daughter into the rear compartment of a Packard touring car parked beside the trough.

Terrorized, the cob horse tears itself free of the shafts and charges down the street, trailing harness.

Tigh Gooding and the Pennington brothers stand by their mounts staring, guns in hands, astounded but not yet sobered by what they have done.

Buell Wood waits.

Galloping.

A runaway horse.

He relaxes, pushes chair from desk, elevates his boots, tilts back, clasps hands comfortably behind his head, gathers wool. The office is sparsely furnished. Against the opposite wall looms a massive glass-fronted bookcase containing his entire library: the
Corpus Juris,
Blackstone’s
Commentaries,
Daniels on
Negotiable Instruments,
Stephens on
Pleading,
the
Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure,
and the
Acts of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of New Mexico.
These volumes are all he needs now, but one day soon, when the Territory achieves statehood, he will start to fill the shelves with
Reports
and
Statutes.

His door flies open.

“Mr. Wood! Oh Mr. Wood!”

It is a clerk from the Guarantee Electric Store, a youth with yellow shoes and a white face.

“Your wife—oh my God, sir, she’s dead! They were drunk! Shooting in town—that’s against the law! Her horse took off! The baby’s all right but Mrs. Wood my God! Out of the buggy headfirst! But the baby’s all right! Those toughs!”

“Whoa, boy,” says Wood. “My wife is dead?”

The clerk bobs.

“Who was shooting?”

The delivery of such tidings appears to have cost the boy every breath in his body. “Tigh. Gooding. Bill. Pen-nington. George. Pennington,” he gasps. “Mr. Wood. So sorry. Dead. The most terrible—”

“Where are they now?”

“The Luna. They went. Back in.”

“Get out.”

The clerk bursts into tears.

“Get out.”

Buell Wood has not moved. On the closing of the door he rises, steps to the bookcase, takes down from its top a flat, rectangular box of mahogany. Returning to the desk, he opens the box. It is lined with blue velvet, and set into the velvet are two Colt New Navy revolvers, that model manufactured between 1892 and 1908, the gift to him by the townspeople upon his resignation. They are .38-caliber, double-action, self-cocking revolvers with six-inch barrels, a high-gloss blue finish, and oil-stained walnut grips. And they are a matched pair, their consecutive serial numbers stamped into the frames above the cylinders. One is numbered 40177, the other 40178. They have never been fired.

In velvet corner compartments are two boxes of long Colt cartridges. The attorney opens them, swings the cylinders free, loads the weapons, snaps the cylinders shut.

He turns then, opens his office door, steps into the pure spring afternoon, begins to walk east down the center of Gold Street.

He walks at a moderate, purposeful pace, arms at sides, a revolver in each hand. Traffic is no impediment, for events have halted it. The sun is at his back, so that he can see two blocks away the buggy, the Marmon sedan, the Packard touring car, and a cluster of people about them.

Blaise Gilmore, his successor as sheriff, reaches the next corner on the run. He steps off the curb, speaks to the walker.

“Don’t do it, Buell.”

The attorney does not pause, does not look at him.

“Leave them to me, Buell.”

“If you try to stop me, Blaise,” is the response, “I’ll kill you.”

Gilmore stays where he is. “He would have, too,” he was later quoted. “Right then that man was walking thunder.”

Buell Wood proceeds, New Navy Colts swinging at his sides. The cluster about the cars and buggy opens as men and women move to watch his coming. Others gape from sidewalks and store windows, from saddles and buckboard seats and through the windows of automobiles. No one seeks shelter. The street is hushed with disbelief. Except for that enacted in motion pictures on the silent screen in the Crystal Theater, Adults 25¢, Children 10¢, there has been no gunplay on Gold Street for nineteen years. By the clock in the tower of the courthouse it is slightly past three in the afternoon of May 10 in the year 1910.

Buell Wood is a tall, handsome man with dark hair and mustache. He wears black serge vest and trousers, white shirt, a black string tie. He has just turned forty years of age.

11:14

11:14

11:14

11:14

I sat on a rock.

In late afternoon I left the highway and drove a sand road a mile into the desert and stopped the car and got out and sat on a rock. I wanted to let a sense of the country seep into me.

I looked down into the valley of the Rio Grande. Smoke in the southern distance signified El Paso, and beyond it Juarez, in Mexico. To the west, somewhere under a red sun, would be Harding, but I had decided to overnight in El Paso and hit Harding early in the morning, lean and mean.

“I’m not afraid,” I said out loud.

My voice vanished.

No, you are not afraid, I told myself. Of these wide-open spaces or the men in boots and big hats or of being murdered. You are merely running an errand for the woman you love because this is the only way you can marry her again and make children and live happily ever after.

I had driven West rather than flying because I wanted to see the U.S.A. I had flown over some of it once in rage and grief, when Tyler walked out on me, nonstop from New York to Acapulco. There I spent a week at a hotel where, in the dining room, in a small pool with gardenias floating, lived a darling turtle named “Chata,” or “Pugnose,” by the waiters, whose only friend was a fat pigeon named “Pedro” who smoked cigar butts. Besides, my classic car now needed an extended run. I garage it except for a month each summer when I take it up to the Cape for my vacation. But I had coddled it too long, for the engine had begun of late to be noisy on the idle. Rodney, my mechanic, informed me this was piston slap, and wearing perhaps of the end bushes. By all means put it on the road, sir, he had advised, give it a good go, then when you return we will decarbonize and have it fit again.

It was excellent advice, and over the four days from the Hudson Tunnel to my present vantage it had performed admirably.

So I sat on a rock in New Mexico. I could see a thousand miles. Over me hung a huge sky. My heart was a muscle. I came down with a case of the nerves.

RATTLESNAKES surrounded me, coiled to strike.

SCORPIONS would any instant tool from under the rock, savage me on my ankles, and as their venom traveled my bloodstream I would collapse, writhe in the dust, and die a horrible death.

Then I began to shrink. I got smaller and smaller. Finally I was only a mote in an immense eyeball. Which was the world. Which stared into infinity.